CRAY ELABORATES ON ORNL SUPERCOMPUTING COLLABORATION

by Tim Curns, Editor

HPCwire's Tim Curns talked with Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk
and Peter Ungaro, Cray's vice president of worldwide sales and marketing,
about the DOE's recently announced plan for Cray and Oak Ridge National
Laboratory to deploy the world's fastest supercomputer.

HPCwire: For our readers, can you summarize the Oak Ridge
plan and Cray's role in it?

Jim: Sure. The plan is to provide the world's most powerful
supercomputer, one with 250 peak teraflops of performance that delivers
50 actual, sustained teraflops. This will be done in stages. The starting
point is Oak Ridge's current Cray X1 supercomputer. The Cray X1 technology
will grow to 20 teraflops this year, and next year we'll also deliver
a 20-teraflop Red Storm- based system, so in 2005 Cray will have 40
teraflops installed at Oak Ridge. The Cray system will increase to
100 peak teraflops in 2006, and the next stage is to expand that to
the 250 peak teraflops system with 50 sustained teraflops in 2007.
Of course, not all the funding is yet in place.

HPCwire: Please explain your relationship with ORNL and
the decisions involved to supply them with the new leadership-class
supercomputer.

Jim: I can talk about it from Cray's perspective. You'd need
to go to the DOE Office of Science for deeper insight into the process
they used to select Oak Ridge. For us, things began in February 2003,
when the DOE Office of Science funded a Cray X1 system at Oak Ridge
to test its effectiveness for leadership- class capability. ORNL, Cray
and many other institutions in the research community worked together
to put that system to the test. This involved an incredible amount
of work by many people. The ORNL CCS (Center for Computational Sciences)
staff was in constant motion upgrading the hardware and software capabilities
of the system. It was a real team effort. In November, Oak Ridge reported
that the X1 was running challenging applications up to 25 times faster
than on other HPC systems. It ran a standard climate code 50 percent
faster per processor than the Earth Simulator. It was very effective.
When Secretary Abraham announced the outcome he said proposals from
four DOE labs were subjected to rigorous peer reviews, and then Dr.
Raymond Orbach, Director of the DOE Office of Science, made a decision
with those recommendations in mind.

HPCwire: Briefly
discuss the Cray system already in use at ORNL and what it is used
for.

Pete: Today, the Cray X1 system at Oak Ridge has 256 multi-streaming
processors and is used for solving important problems across a wide
variety of scientific disciplines. On this three-teraflop system, many
applications are achieving over a teraflop of sustained performance.
Some of these science- driven applications are attaining performance
levels that have already allowed them to push scientific discovery
forward. It is exciting to think about what will happen as the system
begins to grow further.

HPCwire:How will the system be used specifically and what
benefits do you feel the implementation of this supercomputer will
have on the HPC community? Will it have an impact on supercomputing
architectures of the future?

Pete: It will be used for DOE mission-related work, especially
to enable breakthrough discoveries in life sciences, fusion energy,
global climate prediction, astrophysics, nanoscience and many other
scientific disciplines. But it will truly be a national resource. It
will be open to scientists and engineers throughout the country, so
the DOE and Oak Ridge expect to see some major innovations benefiting
not just basic science, but also other industries that rely on high-performance
computing for strategic advantage, such as automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical,
chemical and process industries, to name a few. Oak Ridge and the DOE
Office of Science will be collaborating with other national labs, research
institutions, supercomputing centers, universities and private industry
to make this all happen. Oak Ridge is definitely going to be a hub
of important scientific breakthroughs -- not evolutionary breakthroughs
but true revolutionary breakthroughs.

Jim: When some of the world's most creative scientific and
engineering minds gain access to an HPC tool of unprecedented power
like the planned Oak Ridge system, the resulting innovation will have
a major impact on science, engineering and the HPC industry itself.
The Cray X1 is already yielding important results. From Cray's standpoint,
it's very encouraging to see leading users like Oak Ridge, Sandia,
the Army HPC Research Center, Boeing, Arctic Region Supercomputing
Center, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Warsaw University-ICM, Spain's
National Institute of Meteorology, Korea Meteorological Administration
and others opting for our high-bandwidth, purpose-built HPC systems.
There was a hope that business servers and PCs could handle any HPC
application efficiently and cost-effectively. That has turned out not
to be true. It's good for customers to have choices.

HPCwire: How will this development change or affect Cray
Inc.? Describe the manpower resources Cray will dedicate to this
engagement. Where will it place ORNL relative to other research institutes?

Jim: Being selected to work with Oak Ridge to provide the
world's most powerful supercomputer is another major milestone toward
Cray's renewed HPC leadership. When Cray Research and Tera came together
as a new company in April 2000, we were starting almost from scratch.
We had a deep pool of talent that we've added to since then, we had
important development programs under way, and we had a reservoir of
good will from customers who were unhappy with the limited product
choices in the marketplace. We've come a long way in a short time,
thanks to our customers and our employees.

Pete: One of the most important things is that many, many
researchers in the U.S. and around the world are getting access to
extremely powerful Cray systems again. High-volume user experience
and feedback are invaluable for tailoring products to meet HPC customer
requirements. Unlike most vendors, Cray is 100 percent dedicated to
the HPC market, so this kind of close partnering with customers is
essential for us. Cray already has the major resources we need to handle
our part of the Oak Ridge collaboration- development, manufacturing,
applications and so on. As part of the Cray proposal to ORNL and the
Office of Science, we have committed to form and support a center of
competency at ORNL. This center will include people skilled in development,
systems support and applications, with the goal of working with ORNL
and the scientific community to integrate the various Cray architectures
and work with the users to best take advantage of the Leadership System.
It is very exciting for all of us here at Cray to know that we will
become an important part of the scientific fabric of the United States
at Oak Ridge and other sites.

Jim: I think Oak Ridge can best answer what this means for
them. Certainly, there will be increased recognition for the quality
of research done at the lab.

HPCwire:Do you think a 100-teraflop system slated for
2006-2007 will still be considered the fastest in the world by then?
Where are others' efforts in comparison to yours?

Pete: The Oak Ridge system may be at 250 teraflops or even
a bit larger by 2007. The DOE expects this to be the world's fastest
non-classified supercomputer at that time, and we do, too. Some others
have talked about installing systems with higher peak performance ratings,
but none are likely to produce the type of sustained performance on
demanding applications that will be possible with this system. This
is because Oak Ridge is using high- bandwidth systems designed to achieve
a high percentage of peak performance in practice. The DOE is focusing
on achieving sustained performance, where real work is accomplished.
We applaud them for that.

HPCwire: Why did Oak Ridge choose Cray over its competition?

Pete: Oak Ridge chose to go primarily with Cray after thoroughly
evaluating the Cray X1 and finding that it was up to 25 times faster
than other high-end systems on their applications versus competitors'
systems. We're grateful to DOE, Oak Ridge, and their partners such
as Argonne National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
for the opportunity to prove what our purpose-built systems could do.
It has been a great partnership with them from day one.

HPCwire: What kinds of hurdles will Cray face while implementing
the ORNL system? How does Cray plan to get past these obstacles?

Jim: We'll face the usual challenges vendors face in scaling
up advanced technologies, but we've done this a number of times before.
I don't think there's any group of employees in the HPC industry with
greater experience than Cray employees in implementing innovative technologies
and successfully scaling them up. Think of the Cray T3E, which by the
way is a conceptual predecessor of both the Cray X1 and the Red Storm
architectures. We will learn a lot from this effort, which will also
help us in our Cascade program that focuses on building systems to
sustain petaflops of performance. Of course, Oak Ridge and their partners
will play a role in that program as well.

HPCwire:Will Cray interface with other supercomputer hardware
vendors at ORNL, or will you operate independently?

Pete: We're committed to doing everything we can to help Oak
Ridge and the scientific community achieve their goals. While we aren't
quite sure how all of this will happen yet, we are committed to working
with the entire scientific and vendor community to make this a success.

HPCwire: What else is on Cray's horizon? Any more big surprises
lingering for the future?

Pete: We have a lot of things coming up soon. The annual Cray
User Group (CUG) meeting took place May 17-20 in Knoxville. Cray and
CUG will be co- hosting an advanced technical workshop at CINECA in Bologna,
Italy on June 16- 18. We'll also have our strongest presence ever as
a company at the ISC2004 conference in Heidelberg in the third week of
June. Bill Camp from Sandia National Laboratories will be delivering
a keynote on Red Storm and we'll be talking about our upcoming Cray X1E,
Red Storm and Cray XD1 products-that's the extremely exciting product
we acquired through our OctigaBay merger. I know that many people will
also be very interested to hear how the Leadership system at Oak Ridge
will evolve over time. There are definitely some exciting times ahead.